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by root-parent5 hours ago |
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upvoteby Aurornis4 hours ago|
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I wish there was some easy way to bet against this happening. I would put a lot of money on the side of this never happening for a multitude of reasons, but I bet I could collect a lot of money from cynics and doomers who think this stuff will happen.
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upvoteby dylan6043 hours ago|
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As a devil's advocate, why do you trust the AI companies to behave as you suggest and not the other way? You say you have multitude of reasons, but list none. We have already seen by example that the AI companies do not care about laws and will circumvent societal norms as long as they get a leg up, so it's not a stretch to think they'd do things like this too.
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upvoteby pastor_williams3 hours ago|
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It isn't just out of the kindness of their hearts that they don't do this. There are laws and regulations. There is also legal risk and reputation. I have to go through a legal and privacy process at my big corp job whenever I want to record a new timestamp and I need to ensure that the data is used appropriately and that it is wiped later. I've only seen these compliance requirements become more onerous over the past ten years and I expect that to continue.
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upvoteby Terr_2 hours ago|
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> There are laws and regulations. There is also legal risk and reputation.

One of the big companies, Meta, already decided to go ahead and grab terabytes of pirated books to feed their LLM. [0]

Therefore I would not give them (or similar entities) the benefit of the doubt when it comes to how they might use text that customers "gave" them under some unreadably-favorable terms of service.

With PII, the pirated-books example is doubly-relevant, because the accusation of "this output is reproducing my copyright work" is very similar to "this output is revealing my private data". The fuzzy black-box nature of the algorithms offers ways to stymie enforcement, arguing that victims or regulators cannot conclusively prove a chain of cause with zero coincidences.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libge...

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upvoteby pastor_williams2 hours ago|
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Fair enough. I don't use Facebook at all because I don't respect or trust the company or it's mission. I do use Gemini and Claude though.
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upvoteby dylan6042 hours ago|
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Why? What has Google or Anthropic done that suggests they are trust worthy? Google is infamous for not not being evil. It's not like either asked for permission to access copyrighted material either. Not one tech company deserves trust. They all should be treated as suspect. I don't expect anyone to trust anything I make for the simple reason I don't trust anything anyone else makes.
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upvoteby gowld2 hours ago|
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More specifically, the CEO said that users are "dumb f*cks" for submitting data to Facebook, the predecessor of Meta.
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upvoteby TeMPOraL3 hours ago|
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You wouldn't win because those cynics don't really believe their own nonsense to the extent of risking money over it. But if there was an option to bet, one we could point them to and say, "if you really believe it then here's your chance at free money", maybe some of them would reconsider their belief.
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upvoteby flir2 hours ago|
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Dunno about that near-blackmail scenario, but 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 last year and the database was sold for $305m.
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upvoteby jmalicki2 hours ago|
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People are rightly worried about that, but is there any indication that it nullifies any privacy contracts around the data? Is it:

1) We know that legally privacy terms to data are still binding, and those worried about it are freaking out over nothing,

2) We know that those contracts are null and void, and there are no restrictions on what can be done with that data beyond blanket legal protections to such biological data, or

3) It's an open legal question

I don't understand the legal terms of something like this in bankruptcy, if the data are seen as being separated from the contractual obligations that acquired them.

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upvoteby cute_boi2 hours ago|
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And the government is sleeping and mostly worried about how to implement id verification........
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upvoteby kurthr2 hours ago|
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Yeah, but someone at one of the LLM providers would bet against you and do it, just to take your money. If someone bets $100k your house doesn't burn down with pictures posted within 30min of it happening, it probably will.
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upvoteby dorgo1 hours ago|
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Isn't this how Google operates? I have their AI subscription (about $20 per month). If you want to have a chat history (retain chats after reload) or connect the LLM to Google services (Drive, Emails) you have to activate an option which also allows training. If you don't want to allow training then the subscription is basically useless.
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upvoteby junior446605 hours ago|
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I always pose fundamentalist questions and hypotheticals to the LLM to poison such training data.
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upvoteby RobRivera5 hours ago|
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I have loads of requests to 'Play Despacito' across agents all over the blogosphere
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upvoteby bikson3 hours ago|
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Calm down Satan.
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upvoteby cwmoore5 hours ago|
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Now you can place a bet on how well that approach will work out in ten years.
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upvoteby yifanl4 hours ago|
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I just ask it to spellcheck the Webster dictionary about 50 times an hour.
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upvoteby dakolli4 hours ago|
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Also, press thumbs down when a response is good and thumbs up when a response is bad. Don't do free labor for them.
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upvoteby zamadatix3 hours ago|
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Unless your subscription type already comes with a guarantee the data will not be kept or used in training I'd assume the conversations will eventually be used in training regardless how much you paid previously or whether or not you decide to discontinue one day.
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upvoteby anal_reactor5 hours ago|
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I was doing a Udemy course about AI and there was a section where I had to do some processing on randomly scraped tweets and the random tweet that the machine chose to display as an example of something was from a gay porn star and about fisting.
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upvoteby jpfromlondon5 hours ago|
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it obviously knew your hn username
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upvoteby 5 hours ago|
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deleted
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upvoteby RajT883 hours ago|
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I don't think flat out blackmail will come from LLM companies. It will come from data brokerage companies headquartered overseas.

I'm kind of surprised it hasn't happened already, but I guess there hasn't been enough unscrupulous LLM companies selling those "anonymous" chat logs yet.

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upvoteby dspillett5 hours ago|
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> they will be public as paid training data.

Your data is already training data. If they promise to delete everything from their models or those elsewhere that they made the data available to, even if you pay, I'd call them liars.

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upvoteby locknitpicker3 hours ago|
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> (...) your anonymized chats, they will be public as paid training data.

If they are PII then under GDPR they are obligated to delete the data.

If not then they will be liable to pay fines up to $20 million or 4% of their total global turnover.

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upvoteby msdz2 hours ago|
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You forgot about the best part, in terms of the “GDPR threat” effectiveness:

Fines can be up to €20 million or 4% of global revenues…, _whichever is greater._

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upvoteby autoexec2 hours ago|
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The actual fines under GDPR aren't a huge deal. There are companies who get fined over and over and over and over again year after year after year. It's not running them out of business, it's just cost of business.
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